Girls Best Friend: Part 15

Millie felt guilty about running off on Jay for a second time but he didn’t care about Elvis, he didn’t care that her employer was missing and he didn’t care about her, and so she pushed any feelings of guilt to the back of her mind.

‘Why did you drug me?’ Millie looked directly at Mark; she wanted to see his reaction to her question. Mark looked across at Millie, ‘I didn’t. That was Michael, he thought you might try and run off…pah! I guess he didn’t count on you having a partner. Are you going to tell me what happened?’

Millie ignored his question, and answered him by asking another, ‘How did you know where to find me?’, ‘I followed you, it wasn’t hard and he didn’t try to lose me, when I saw him leave I knew you wouldn’t be far behind.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Nothing, I just know that when you were seeing him you didn’t seem happy and I didn’t think you would stick around and I wasn’t wrong...was I?’

She looked at him. She had thought she knew him quite well but it wasn’t until you were in extraordinary circumstances that you really discovered people’s truth.  In a million years she would never have thought he would be involved in some kind of criminal activity and she still didn’t know what had happened to Denise. She had so many questions and she wasn’t sure which to ask first, then from nowhere she blurted out, ‘I saw Anne in Paris…’ and silence filled the car for a while. Millie kept an eye on Mark and noticed his jaw clench and his brow slightly furrow. She wanted to ask more questions but she let the last one sit in the air between them. The silence, as deafening as it was, peaked Millie’s interest and she knew that she would wait out the silence until he spoke.

The digital clock on the dashboard told Millie that it had been 47 minutes since she last spoke, she had watched out of the window as they passed through towns and villages on their way to Madrid.  The sun beat down on the windscreen of the car and made her feel sweaty and uncomfortable, she wound down the window to let some air in and as she did so, Mark leaned forward and switched the air conditioning on, and she rolled it back up as she felt the cool breeze.

‘Anne is…Anne is…involved with the kidnapping of Mr Rob.’

‘I know that much...how?’

‘She knew about the diamonds, heard about them during pillow talk with Mr Roberts, and she conspired with Eddie to steal them…Eddie went to the wrong people for help in pulling of the job, wanted to impress his brother, but they tricked him…Anne was just using him…the gang that did the kidnapping is led by her son, Jack. Their plan went a bit wrong and here we are. I contacted Michael for help and he said he would send in a Retriever…I just didn’t know it would be you?’

‘How do you know this though? And what happened to Denise?’ More silence followed and Millie mentally filed the bit about her being a retriever, she didn’t even know what one was, her neighbour growing up had a golden retriever but she didn’t think he was referring to her as one.

‘I don’t want to talk about that now. We are nearly at our hotel, we can check in and get some rest, maybe look around Madrid and then head on to Algeciras.’

‘But, I want to know what’s going on? I don’t even know that I should trust you!’

‘Really? Then what are you doing in my car?’ Millie didn’t have an answer for that. What was she doing in his car?

She returned to her silence as the car moved along at a snail’s pace a few miles outside of Madrid. There was some kind of delay that was causing a tail back and the heat of the midday sun beating down on the car had negated the effects of the air conditioning.

She gazed out of the window at the Spanish countryside, although the temperature was high and Millie felt sweaty, every time the cold air hit her body it made her shudder. Looking out of the window at the over farmed terrain as it spread out in mounds of dust and orange groves her eye was drawn by the litter glittering in the sunlight like jewels, and it reminded Millie of the cause of this trip.

‘What happened?...you know…before. How did the diamonds get to be in Marrakech?’ she asked, wanting to fill the silence that sat recumbent between them.

‘I should tell you why?’ was his reply.

‘…a million times better than listening to you breathe’ she retaliated.

‘not the best excuse’ he said and leaned forward to turn on the car radio, it clicked to signify that it was on, but no sound came from the speakers. As if that was a cue, Mark said, ‘Ok…I’ll tell you what I know…’